Doha 12

by Lance Charnes

  Copyright © 2012 by Lance W. Charnes

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

  Wombat Group Media

  Post Office Box 17190

  Anaheim, CA 92817

  http://www.wombatgroup.com/

  First ePub Edition, December 2012

  Second ePub Edition, January 2014

  ISBN 978-0-9886903-2-5

  Cover design by Damonza.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No animals were harmed in the writing of this novel.

  Created in the United States of America

  .

  For Betty

  Who put up with all this

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  The “Doha 12”

  Jake Eldar, bookstore manager, Brooklyn

  · Rinnah Eldar, Jake’s wife

  · Eve (Chava) Eldar, their daughter

  · Gene Eldar, NYPD inspector; Jake’s uncle

  Miriam Schaffer, legal secretary, Philadelphia

  Nathan Brown, advertising, East Islip, NY

  Frank Demetrio, estate lawyer, Burbank, CA

  Andre Dujardin, architect, Paris

  Erika Grusst, chemistry professor, Hamburg

  Stuart Kaminsky, corporate security consultant, Paramus, NJ

  Jules Krosner, shipping agent, Marseille

  Carlo Massarani, Maserati executive, Modena

  Oren Nussberger, IMF, Arlington, VA

  Elia Sabatello, stockbroker, Milan

  Albert Schoonhaven, engineer, Rotterdam

  Mossad

  Refael Gur (aka Ephraim), team leader

  Gur’s team:

  · Amzi Bar’el

  · Natan Ettinger

  · Kelila Haberman (aka Elena, Sandrine)

  · David Holmeyer

  · Sasha Panikovsky

  Chaim Orgad, chief of Komemiute; Gur’s boss

  Hezbollah

  Fadi Alayan (aka Jabbar), direct-action team leader

  Alayan’s team:

  · Kassim Haddad, 2nd in command

  · Sohrab Alikhani

  · Ziyad al-Amin

  · Rafiq Herzallah

  · Gabir Raad

  Adad al-Shami (aka Majid), bombmaster, Detroit

  Fayiz Jenyat, al-Shami’s assistant

  Mahir Hashim, shahid (suicide bomber)

  Haroun Sahabi, shahid

  ONE: Brooklyn, New York, 12 September

  Jake heaved the wheeled metal cart into the Religion section, rolled out his shoulders, then started reshelving the books the morning’s customers had left strewn all over the café and lounge. He smiled at the great cosmic joke this section told—Christian Inspiration across from Eastern Religions, Buddhism and Hinduism next to Islam. Nothing burning and nobody dying. Try that in the real world.

  He didn’t have to pull shelf duty—he was the manager, he could get one of the kids to do it—but it let him have some contact with the books as something other than entries on a spreadsheet. Even after six years of ten- or twelve-hour days, he still loved the smell of new books, crisp paper and glue promising new ideas or new worlds.

  His phone chirped. He pressed the switch on his headset. “Yeah?”

  “Jake, um, could you come down here?” Gwyneth sounded jumpier than usual. “Some kinda scary guys wanna talk to you.”

  “Sure.” Jake sighed, wrestled the overloaded cart out of the aisle, parked it next to the endcap. What set off Gwyneth this time? To her, “scary” meant someone wearing a tie.

  He spotted them the moment the escalator brought him within sight of the register counter. Two men, dark suits, safe ties, short hair, watchful eyes. Cops, he figured. What did they want? Gwyneth cowered behind her register a few feet to the right of the cops, wrapping herself tight in her black knit cardigan, as if waiting for the men to bite her.

  Jake closed with the men, gave each of them a scan. One fair-haired white, one semi-dark Latino, clean-shaven, thirties, serious. “You looking for me?”

  The white one returned the examination. “Jacob Eldar?”

  “Yeah.”

  The cop pulled a flat leather folder from his inside coat pocket, let it fall open. “Special Agent Johanssen, FBI. This is Special Agent Medina. There someplace we can talk?”

  “Uh, sure, come on.” Jake led them upstairs to the edge of the mostly-empty café. Why would the FBI want to talk to him? Subversive books? Sure, like those would make the buy list.

  They sat at a red laminate two-top next to the windows overlooking the street, Jake on one side, both the agents crowded around the other. Kelli, the new girl on coffee duty, took one look at the three of them and skittered to the café’s far end to wipe down tables.

  Medina started before Jake could think of anything to say. “Do you still hold dual citizenship, Mr. Eldar? American and Israeli?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you in contact with anyone in Israel? Other than your parents.”

  Something scurried around Jake’s gut. The FBI knew about his parents? “Couple friends, an army buddy. Why?”

  “Have you been approached by anyone with the Israeli government, or, say, an Israeli company?”

  He hadn’t had any contact with the Israeli government since he’d dragged Rinnah here to get away from the place. He hoped he never would. “No, nobody. What’s this about?”

  Johanssen leaned his forearms on the table. “Read the paper, Mr. Eldar?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You see about that terrorist guy got killed in Qatar couple weeks back?”

  “I saw it happened. Didn’t spend a lot of time on it.”

  “Well.” Johanssen tapped the table with two fingers. “Someone using your passport and your name may have been involved. You lend your passport to anyone, Mr. Eldar?”

  Jake glanced between the two agents, wondering when they’d break out laughing and the guy with the video camera would pop out from behind the espresso machine. “Are you serious? Why would I do that?”

  Medina pulled a paper from inside his coat, unfolded it, smoothed it on the middle of the table. “Do you know this man?”

  A man in his forties stared back at him from the grainy, blown-up passport photo. Triangular face, broken nose, straight black hair, moustache, sober glasses. Darkish skin; he could be any kind of Mediterranean, even Latino. “Never saw him before.”

  “According to Qatari Immigration, that’s Jacob Eldar of 475 18th Street, Brooklyn.”

  Shit. Jake looked into the fixed dark eyes in the photo. His name, his address. But why him? What else did this guy take? “Who is he really?”

  Johanssen shrugged. “Don’t know. Smart money’s on Mossad right now, you know, the Israeli CIA.”

  “I know who they are.” And wished he didn’t, but the Feds didn’t need to know about that. “Can’t help you. Sorry.”

  The two agents exchanged “are you done?” glances. Medina flashed Jake a polite smile, snapped a business card down on the table. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Eldar. If you think of anything, please call.” They stood; so did Jake.

  He shook hands with them both, said, “Buy some coffee while you’re here. We need th
e business.”

  Jake drifted back downstairs to the customer service desk while the agents confused Kelli with their orders. He slumped on the stool, stared at the company screen saver bouncing across the computer monitor. Mossad used my name? Why? It couldn’t be random; Mossad didn’t do random.

  Payback?

  He braced his elbows on the green laminate desktop, lowered his face into his hands.

  Mossad did payback.

  TWO: Tel Aviv, Israel, 12 September

  Refael Gur’s morning coffee hadn’t yet kicked in when he got the call to report to the chief’s office. This, he didn’t need. He needed to dedicate his first day back at Mossad headquarters to his expense vouchers and the mission report. The accountants probably already flagged him late with his receipts.

  He threaded his way through the narrow hallways, returning nods, ignoring the whispers as he passed. Komemiute was a small operation; it didn’t take an intelligence analyst to figure out who’d done the Doha job. At least he was finally rid of that damn moustache.

  Chaim Orgad glanced up from the paper he was signing when Gur knocked on his doorframe. “Raffi.” He pointed to the chrome-framed chair in front of his desk. Gur didn’t have to be told to close the door behind him.

  Orgad tossed the morning’s Yediot Aharonot in Gur’s lap. Gur already knew what the front-page headline said; the same as every other newspaper in Israel that morning. He skimmed the story to see if this bunch knew anything more than Haaretz.

  DOHA, Qatar – The Qatari National Police revealed today that Masoud Talhami, who was discovered dead of an apparent heroin overdose in his luxury hotel room on August 30, may have been killed by an Israeli assassination squad.

  Talhami, 53, a ranking member of Hezbollah’s military committee, was one of the instigators of the second Palestinian intifada…

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Good. So?”

  “So what? We knew they’d figure it out. I told you this would be a repeat of Dubai. I guess the P.M. didn’t care?”

  “Perhaps. We’d get blamed even if the bastard cooked himself, so perhaps the P.M. decided it was worth being rid of him.” Orgad slapped closed a folder, flapped it into his plastic out box. “What did they find? What do they have on you?”

  Gur shrugged. “Lots of video, I’m sure. We took out the camera covering Talhami’s door, but it’s impossible to get them all, it’s not even worth trying. It’s not like when you were in the field anymore.” It was hard to picture this gray-fringed, paunchy, bald old man as a trained killer, but Gur knew better. Menachem Begin hadn’t looked much like an assassin, either. “Nothing physical in the hotel. We didn’t stay there except for the couple of hours around the job, and I made sure the team kept their gloves on. The Qataris will eventually find the rooms we stayed in, but the maids will have taken care of anything we left behind there. So, probably nothing.”

  Orgad nodded, folded his hands over the faded windowpane-plaid shirt stretched across his belly. “At least you didn’t look into the cameras, like those idiots in Dubai.” He pointed to the newspaper. “Still, there you are on the front page. I have a meeting with the Director at ten. He’ll want to know why we can’t manage a simple job without becoming media stars. What do I tell him?”

  “Tell him we can’t do this shit anymore.” Gur twirled the newspaper back onto Orgad’s desk blotter. “1972 was a long time ago. There’s too damn many cameras now. There’s biometrics in the passports. There’s watch lists. You can’t use cash anymore. It’s over, Chaim. Let’s just build ourselves some more drones and kill these bastards from a thousand miles away, like the Americans.”

  Orgad frowned, eyed Gur across the cheap laminate desk. Gur avoided him by roving his gaze around this monk’s cell of an office. The only wall decorations were the official photos of the President and Prime Minister. In this line of work, you didn’t accumulate a lot of pictures of yourself with your co-workers, far less with the high and mighty.

  Finally, Orgad stopped nodding. “Those are the words of a tired man.”

  Gur flashed back two weeks: the nighttime view of Doha from the twelfth floor. That miserable prostitute-addict they’d dredged out of the guest-worker slums at the southwest end of the city, a jumble of skin-wrapped bones dead on the bed from an overdose of pure Afghan heroin. That bastard Talhami, drugged and stuffed full of vodka before he followed the whore to hell. His team watching the scene unfold, surrounded by the beige luxury of yet another high-end hotel in yet another city he’d never wanted to see. This is how I serve my country. Would the man whose name he’d used—Jaakov Eldar—be proud of what they’d done?

  “Raffi?”

  “I can’t stop being tired,” he sighed. “We do this—” Gur pointed toward the paper “—over and over, and it doesn’t help. We’re not winning the war. We can’t kill our way to victory.” He knew he shouldn’t say these things to his boss, but he didn’t care anymore. He’d be happy to sit a desk for the next ten years until he retired. Maybe he could try to build another life if he wasn’t always a visitor to his own homeland.

  Orgad nodded some more, then folded his arms on the desktop. “Well. You need a rest. Things always look dark after a nasty job. Tsach Voydievsky just left for embassy duty in Brazil, so the Director needs an interim day chief in the Watch Center. I’ll give him your name. With your face all over the news, you’ll have to stay home anyway.”

  Whatever “home” was. “Thanks. We should keep an eye on those people whose names we used, just in case. We’ve put them in harm’s way, it’s the least we can do.”

  “In case Hezbollah decides to go after them? You know that’s not how they play the game. Stay out of the nightclubs and cafes for a couple of weeks, wait for the bombing, then we move on, yes?”

  Gur tried not to grimace. They had an obligation to those people. “Yes, of course.” He stood, turned to the door, then stopped. “When did you know it was time to get out of the field?”

  “When I almost shot my wife sneaking into the bedroom with breakfast for me on my birthday. But you?” Orgad squinted at Gur, as if looking into his skull. “I think you’re close. We’ll talk in a few days. Shalom, Raffi.”

  THREE: Haret Hraik, South Beirut, Lebanon, 13 September

  Fadi Alayan stood on the seventh-floor balcony with his face turned to the buttery afternoon sun. Happy traffic sounds pinged off the apartment-block canyon to bless his ears. Car and truck horns, engines revving, squawks from tires spinning too suddenly or stopping too fast. Arabic rap, Lebanese pop, Nelly Furtado. An ambulance siren, the neighbors’ television turned too loud.

  Noise was a good thing, a happy thing. After the 2006 war with the Zionists, this area lay destroyed, the streets piled with concrete rubble and torn-apart cars. You could hear from a block away the women crying in the night for the innocent dead. Among those dead were his wife and parents. He could still see the ruins of their bodies when his mind went to the wrong places.

  Now the martyrs were buried, the apartments rebuilt and the markets open again. Kids played in the alleys and went to school. Alayan watched the people stream by on the sidewalks below his balcony. His pride stood tall inside him; in his own little way, he’d helped bring this area back to life.

  Him, and the Party of God. Hezbollah.

  “Fadi.” Alayan glanced over his shoulder to Kassim, who stood in the open sliding door. He looked himself again: carefully dressed, hair neatly cut, the dark circles gone from around his large eyes. The last job had been hard on them all. “Rafiq finally showed up. They’re all here.”

  Alayan nodded, took one last look at the street parade, then followed his lieutenant into the white-walled apartment. He detoured to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of Raya water from the humming refrigerator, then straddled the wood-frame chair at the little living room’s center. Two overused blue sofas met in the opposite corner. Two of his team sprawled on the sofa to his right; three, including Kassim, filled the one to his left, under the y
ellow-and-green martyr poster Ziyad had taped up the day before. Masoud Talhami gazed back at him out of the poster, clean and sober and serious in a dark business suit and kaffiyeh. The stupid son of a whore.

  “All right,” Alayan started. “You men are doing okay? You’re rested?” He looked from face to face. Each nodded in his turn. Kassim lit one of his wretched Byblos cigarettes. Rafiq, as usual, looked like he’d just rolled out of bed. “Are you getting any sleep, Rafiq?”

  “Trying not to, sidi.”

  Alayan shook his head, bemused. “Well, stay out of the clubs tonight. Get your lives in order. Shave. We have work, and we’re going to be gone a while.”

  His team woke up, sat up straighter, watched with sharper eyes. He could hear the speculation whir in their brains.

  He nodded toward the poster. “The Qataris are certain the Zionists killed Talhami. The Mossad. So far they’ve released the names of twelve people on the country team, and they’re still digging. Knowing it’s Mossad, eight to sixteen’s the usual number.”

  “I knew it,” Ziyad said. “Who else, except maybe the Americans?”

  Alayan took a swig of water, thought about how to say this next part. “Sayyid Nasrallah pledged our revenge for this on al-Manar. The Council has decided we’re the ones to deliver it.”

  Now all of them leaned forward, elbows or forearms on their knees, eyes locked on his face. Gabir smiled like a hungry dog, dark head bobbing over his tight green, long-sleeved t-shirt. “We finally get to drive a bomb into the Dizengoff mall?”

  “No.” Gabir frowned; Alayan knew he’d pout now. “No, we’re not doing anything like that. That’s just what the Jews expect, and that’s not what the Council wants this time.” He folded his arms on top of the chair’s back. “Think about the Mossad for a moment.”

  “Bastards,” muttered Ziyad.

  “Maybe. But think of their reputation. Why does the world think they’re the best intelligence service?”